How pitifully marginalised of us not to notice, until now, the wonderful fracas that has been going on between The Voice of Todays Apathetic Youth (or “VTAY” as the in-crowd call it) and “Award-winning Wirter”, the Australian‘s Caroline Overington.

VTAY, in a post, referred to as the Overington Affair (or, “L’Affaire Overington“) said this:

That was written after Overington scrawled a column saying Ecuyer planned to direct preferences away from Newhouse, who it seems she’s been sharpening an axe for. Apparently the two of them [Newhouse and Ecuyer] went out for a few weeks, it didn’t work out, and now she’s back to boil his pets and derail his political career, er, run as an independent. Anyway, here’s the money email.

^{“Too early! My girl, you’ve got four weeks!!
Please preference Malcolm. It would be such a good front page
story. Also, he’d be a loss to the parliament and George – forgive
me – would be no gain. ;)
— Email from Caroline Overington to Danielle Ecuyer“}

How did she manage to type that with the Member for Wentworth‘s member in her mouth?

This, of course is the kind of gritty, satirical, political, challenging, hilarious blogging that we love to read.

Now, despite the fact that just about everybody and their blog have ridiculed “Overanova”, she chose to try to bully the minnow (VTAY), rather than the whales, into retracting the post. VTAY reports she made threats, over the phone, of legal action etc. etc. We love this. This is territory that Values Australia knows somewhat. VTAY declined, posted a report of the contretemps on its blog and generated a new instance of the Streisand Effect whereby what the complainant tries to hide becomes rapidly and embarrassingly widely known.

We fear that our own “Caroline”, a Bob Correll from DIC, suffered a similar effect. Mind you, he never talks to us any more, even though we do canvass his views from time to time.

In any case we later determined, thanks largely to a post by Ken Parish at Club Troppo , that a finding in the High Court of Australia, Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that Sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution provide an implied freedom of political speech. (That’s why we refer to those sections in our Banner.) This is from the ruling:

ss 7 and 24 and the related sections of the Constitution necessarily protect that freedom of communication between the people concerning political or government matters which enables the people to exercise a free and informed choice as electors. Those sections do not confer personal rights on individuals. Rather they preclude the curtailment of the protected freedom by the exercise of legislative or executive power.

You can see more of the excerpt at the link above or you’ll find the full ruling here.

Given the nature and context of VTAY’s reference, we’re sure Caroline would have a great deal of trouble prosecuting her case, not to mention the exponentially greater notoriety and ridicule she would certainly attract, or the disappearance of the last vestiges of her credibility which, after all, is her stock in trade as a “wirter”.

Anyway, Check out VTAY’s post – it’s excellent!

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